Balance your balls
Guide your ball along the surface to counterbalance the oncoming objects' weight.
Grab bonus orbs
Every orb has a hidden bonus that you could activate on demand. Some are frequent, and some rare.
Increase mass
Challenge yourself to balance balls with different masses. It will not be as easy as it seems.
Balancing Balls
This app needs you to balance the balls on a swiveling surface while challenging you with variating ball mass and size, and teaching you how physics works.
Annoying
Competitive
Engaging
Monetizable
Game Physics
Gravity
Most elements in this game will be affected by gravity. The gravity can change as the user progresses, in order to make the game more challenging, or temporarily disabled as a bonus.
Balance
All objects travel on a swiveling surface. The edges become rounder as the game progresses, impacting the objects' paths and challenging the user further.
Mass
While both gravity and weight distribution change, so does the objects' mass. Both the user's ball and the oncoming balls can differ in mass, skewing the balance further.
Objective, Incentives, and Challenges
The objective:
Get as many balls to pass you, while balancing them so they don't fall off the edges. The more balls make it through, the more coins you get.
The Incentive:
You get 3 lives every day. You may gain lives through bonuses, ads, coins from previous wins or in-app purchases. The better you perform (more balls getting through) the more coins you get to buy more lives.
You can also activate captured bonuses:
- Guard rails
- Disable gravity
- Mass increase/decrease
- God-mode (roll through objects)
The Challenge:
As the user levels up, the game becomes more challenging with shifting gravity, and mass changes to objects, so the user has to stay engaged and focused.
Designing my first mobile game
I've always wanted to design a mobile game, but only recently had that eureka moment of what the concept should be.
I wanted my game to be simple enough for people to use it, but also be annoying, like Flappy Bird. (without copying Flappy Bird)
I love the idea of balance and wanted to challenge users with their ability to control the balance between multiple objects on a swiveling surface.
The name is a bit of a naughty inuendo because I believe it will be popular with nerds like myself and my closest friend.
Monetization
This app will generate revenue through two channels:
In-game ads:
Every time the user uses all their lives, they can get another life by watching an ad. This is limited to 10 ads/day.
In-app purchases:
If the user is impatient and doesn't want to watch ads, they can purchase bundles of lives:
- 10 lives
- 50 lives
- 100 lives
- 500 lives
Gamescreen Wireframe
To control your ball, you need to command it to move along the surface and between the various objects. Also, you need to be able to activate your bonuses without reaching or looking elsewhere, so these need to be reachable for the user's thumb.
Finally, there's the exit/pause menu.
That's it.
Simple.
Control Options
Tilting your phone
Dragging your finger
Visualizing the game in 3D
To better immerse myself in the world I'm building, I built it in Blender and created a short animation. Granted, it is not perfect, and I still have work to do, but it shows the basic concept.
Scroll down to view it.
Test Animation
Monetization
Flow
Chart
As a concept, I believe it makes sense, and that users will be able to enjoy it and even spend their money on it. That said, there is still a lot of work before this can even be sent over to a developer. For instance, I have to work on the branding and the graphics. Additionally, I would have to develop the game-rules a lot further, including levels, physical impacts, and bonus effects.
I developed everything I presented on this page from brain-fart to visuals in less than a week, so imagine what I could do in a month!
Conclusion: Stay tuned. This might just be a game to take the nerdiverse by storm.
What's still left to do: